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I think futurists with a progressive bent can also be guilty of the opposite: assuming the cultural future somehow won't follow the present. The age of technolo

I think futurists with a progressive bent can also be guilty of the opposite: assuming the cultural future somehow won't follow the present. The age of technological advancement will inevitably be good, because it will also miraculously be missing all our current bugbears like prejudice and inequality, which technology might otherwise worsen, rather than eliminate. If we like to think that we're far more advanced than our predecessors, the conclusion is that our descendants will leave us in the dust. Maybe misplaced faith in the former encourages our hope for the latter over a dystopia where everything is as bad as it already is, only worse.

gedy 8y ago
A lot of that is due to this "blank slate" idea of humans. All bias, instincts, gut reactions, etc is all learned behaviour, and if we just changed culture it would all go away. (Not that I agree with that)
- freshhawk 8y ago
  But they also assume culture will just change in the way they want as opposed to having to be changed. That is probably the larger mistake.
Nasrudith 8y ago
Really you can't assume culture one way or another. Conservative futurists assume that the social norms and traditions will stay forever when that wasn't the case even centuries ago. It brings to mind science fiction from the 50s which assumes their values will remain. Living cultures are fundamentally a Ship of Theseus - while some aspects may remain you can't assume - even what they hold most sacred.
philwelch 8y ago
There are a few things that give me pause about progressive visions of the future, but the biggest one is just the sheer terrifying demographics of it. The predominant culture of the developed world is catastrophically infertile. The more progressive parts of these cultures are often the least fertile, while the more conservative and traditional parts are more fertile. But the offspring of these traditional subcultures often convert into the progressive culture, at least where that culture is more prosperous and holds higher perceived status. Part of what makes religions so persistent is their evolutionary fitness from a memetic perspective. “Tell everyone you know to worship $DEITY, have lots of babies, and also kill/shun anyone who tries to stop worshipping $DEITY” is a great algorithm for maximizing the number of $DEITY-worshippers. “Never have sex or try to convert anyone” is a shitty algorithm, which is why the Shakers are practically extinct while Islam is on course to become the world’s largest religion (and may already be, if you subtract the plurality of western Christians who are behaviorally secular anyway). I suspect some memetic program that survives contact with science, prosperity, and progressivism without turning infertile, if it ever evolves, will be the foundation of the future of human culture.
- labster 8y ago
  > the developed world is catastrophically infertile I read that more as "have defused the population bomb". Cultures that have less children have more wealth to pass on to their children, making each one more likely to survive. The rest of the world having tons of children is likely to face shortages of land, water, food, health care... etc. This leads to all sorts of instability, which I'm sure you can imagine. The thing is, liberalism has a lot of memetic fitness too. Classical liberalism has been devouring the world for the past few centuries, and while it occasionally suffers setbacks, it's done very very well against kings, dictators, popes, shoguns, and the like trying to hold it back. Just because liberalism is in a decline now doesn't mean that it's lost its power.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    The good thing about extinction is that it indeed defuses the population bomb. Rich liberal societies consistently reproduce at less than replacement. This is obviously unsustainable; a population that doesn’t reproduce fast enough to replace itself will go extinct. Obviously unsustainable growth isn’t a great thing either, but as long as the rate of growth is low enough for technology to keep up, the earth can actually sustain a surprisingly high population in comfortable conditions. The limiting factor turns out to be energy.
    - labster 8y ago
      But exponential human population growth is currently unsustainable, and has been for the last 70 years. Global warming is proof that the are using ecosystem services faster than they can be replenished, which is having cascading effects across trophic levels. We're in the middle of a mass extinction. In order to get down to levels of human population that we should have, the nonviolent solution is to drop reproduction below replacement rate for a few generations. This is good. Why on earth do people equate negative population growth with extinction? Populations of most species rise and fall all the time with availability of resources and amount of predation. This is Ecology 101 stuff. I feel like most of the people who argue this have some sort of deep-seated fear that the world with run out of white people and God forbid non-Caucasians take over the world. But societies reproduce memetically, not genetically, so it doesn't really matter about local reproduction levels -- as long as you have immigration, a society survives. Agreed that energy removes a lot of barriers, but not all of the limits. Earth is still a constant size, and having an ecosystem is helpful to us. But with enough energy, other planets start looking attractive.

gedy 8y ago

A lot of that is due to this "blank slate" idea of humans. All bias, instincts, gut reactions, etc is all learned behaviour, and if we just changed culture it would all go away. (Not that I agree with that)

freshhawk 8y ago
But they also assume culture will just change in the way they want as opposed to having to be changed. That is probably the larger mistake.

Nasrudith 8y ago

Really you can't assume culture one way or another. Conservative futurists assume that the social norms and traditions will stay forever when that wasn't the case even centuries ago. It brings to mind science fiction from the 50s which assumes their values will remain. Living cultures are fundamentally a Ship of Theseus - while some aspects may remain you can't assume - even what they hold most sacred.

philwelch 8y ago

There are a few things that give me pause about progressive visions of the future, but the biggest one is just the sheer terrifying demographics of it. The predominant culture of the developed world is catastrophically infertile. The more progressive parts of these cultures are often the least fertile, while the more conservative and traditional parts are more fertile. But the offspring of these traditional subcultures often convert into the progressive culture, at least where that culture is more prosperous and holds higher perceived status. Part of what makes religions so persistent is their evolutionary fitness from a memetic perspective. “Tell everyone you know to worship $DEITY, have lots of babies, and also kill/shun anyone who tries to stop worshipping $DEITY” is a great algorithm for maximizing the number of $DEITY-worshippers. “Never have sex or try to convert anyone” is a shitty algorithm, which is why the Shakers are practically extinct while Islam is on course to become the world’s largest religion (and may already be, if you subtract the plurality of western Christians who are behaviorally secular anyway). I suspect some memetic program that survives contact with science, prosperity, and progressivism without turning infertile, if it ever evolves, will be the foundation of the future of human culture.

labster 8y ago
> the developed world is catastrophically infertile I read that more as "have defused the population bomb". Cultures that have less children have more wealth to pass on to their children, making each one more likely to survive. The rest of the world having tons of children is likely to face shortages of land, water, food, health care... etc. This leads to all sorts of instability, which I'm sure you can imagine. The thing is, liberalism has a lot of memetic fitness too. Classical liberalism has been devouring the world for the past few centuries, and while it occasionally suffers setbacks, it's done very very well against kings, dictators, popes, shoguns, and the like trying to hold it back. Just because liberalism is in a decline now doesn't mean that it's lost its power.
- philwelch 8y ago
  The good thing about extinction is that it indeed defuses the population bomb. Rich liberal societies consistently reproduce at less than replacement. This is obviously unsustainable; a population that doesn’t reproduce fast enough to replace itself will go extinct. Obviously unsustainable growth isn’t a great thing either, but as long as the rate of growth is low enough for technology to keep up, the earth can actually sustain a surprisingly high population in comfortable conditions. The limiting factor turns out to be energy.
  - labster 8y ago
    But exponential human population growth is currently unsustainable, and has been for the last 70 years. Global warming is proof that the are using ecosystem services faster than they can be replenished, which is having cascading effects across trophic levels. We're in the middle of a mass extinction. In order to get down to levels of human population that we should have, the nonviolent solution is to drop reproduction below replacement rate for a few generations. This is good. Why on earth do people equate negative population growth with extinction? Populations of most species rise and fall all the time with availability of resources and amount of predation. This is Ecology 101 stuff. I feel like most of the people who argue this have some sort of deep-seated fear that the world with run out of white people and God forbid non-Caucasians take over the world. But societies reproduce memetically, not genetically, so it doesn't really matter about local reproduction levels -- as long as you have immigration, a society survives. Agreed that energy removes a lot of barriers, but not all of the limits. Earth is still a constant size, and having an ecosystem is helpful to us. But with enough energy, other planets start looking attractive.